Contact centers, such as Automatic Call Distribution or ACD systems, are employed by many enterprises to service customer contacts. A typical contact center includes a switch and/or server to receive and route incoming packet-switched and/or circuit-switched interactions and one or more resources, such as human agents and automated resources (e.g., Interactive Voice Response (IVR) units), to service the incoming customer contacts.
The ACD workflow routing engine in the contact center directs contacts to various agents based on sophisticated algorithms and a number of predetermined criteria. Typically the criteria for servicing the contact, from the moment the contact center becomes aware of the contact until the contact is connected to an agent, are customer-specifiable (i.e., programmable by the operator or manager of the contact center), via a capability called vectoring for calls, or through complex programmable workflows that determine the right or “optimal” agent based on various predetermined criteria. Normally, predetermined criteria include agent skills, interaction requirements, media type and availability of an agent, expected contact wait time, customer identity, customer class membership, relatedness to other customer communications (e.g., threads), previous interaction history, etc. ACDs commonly use skills-based routing in which the ACD identifies all predefined customer interaction-handling skills of the agent and delivers to the agent the contact that matches the agent's highest-priority skill. If the contact is document-based (e.g., email, fax, Short Message Service or SMS message, instant message, etc.), the matching can also be done based on analyzing the contact's content via natural language processing of the content to determine the topic and then routing the contact to an agent deemed the Subject Matter Expert or SME for that topic. Commonly, the only conditions that result in a customer contact not being delivered are that there are no available agents (in which case the contact is queued to be routed to the next available agent) or that there are no customer contacts to be delivered.
In contact centers, there is frequently a need to provide intra-enterprise contacts, such as agent-to-agent contacts and supervisor-to-agent contacts, to agents in a manner that does not interrupt the servicing of customer contacts. The current approaches for delivering such contacts, and their drawbacks, are best illustrated by supervisor-to-agent contacts provided to agents as part of a training program to improve agent performance.
Currently, training programs involve monitoring agent interactions in the contact center, collecting and analyzing the events against a norm (or desired interaction), and delivering a visual indication of the process violation or improvement to a supervisor or agent against future state interactions which may meet similar criteria. The remedy for this situation may be an offline coaching session or a training module notification delivered during lulls in contact demand.
Current approaches do not predictively assess the impact of how to balance whether a resource should receive a customer contact or an agent training notification against the total work occurring in real time in the contact center. Current approaches depend on human resources to coach the agent on their process violations once they occur and are aggregated, perhaps taking the agent offline, or “interrupting” current call processing at the expense of real-time service goals, or waiting for scheduled or unscheduled “lulls” in customer contacts.
Current approaches do not anticipate work that is “about to occur”, or “is occurring”, which may be at risk for similar inefficient service or lack of relevant information. In other words, the approaches aggregate only work that has already occurred.
Current approaches do not assess the impact of imparting additional information to particular call types against total service level commitment occurring in real time in the contact center. Such information is relevant when an impending contact type, that has been previously serviced poorly, is identified in the work queue and when a contact is received that could benefit from a process improvement, such as imparting additional information or insights to the customer (such as additional offers).
Finally, current approaches do not deliver notifications independent of any impending contact.